>> Narrator: From New York City It's theCUBE covering New Relic FutureStack 2019. Brought to you by New Relic. >> Hi, I'm Stu Minimen and we're here at New Relic's FutureStack 2019 at the Grand Hyatt, next to Grand Central Station, here in New York City. Happy to welcome to the program a first time guest, Roger Scott who's the Chief Customer Officer at New Relic. Roger, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks, Stu. Thanks for having me on. Good to be here. >> Alright so, I love this morning actually in addition to hearing all of the announcements, my first hand full of guests on theCUBE were customers. So I got to hear from them and we know your team is always excited about the announcements, but definitely enthusiasm from the customers, things in the keynote that got people. >> Fired up! Yeah. >> Clapping, and fired up. >> Great to see. >> Things like, oh wait! 10 terabytes of data, pressure thing, refresh for like a second, and >>oh my gosh! There's results. Yeah >> Pretty impressive so maybe give us a little bit of insight into customer engagement and how it's let to the bevy of announcements here at the show. >> Oh it's a great question actually and I think in my capacity as Chief Customer Officer and the functions I'm responsible for, we're continually engaging with customers as you can imagine. And one of the things we take a lot of pride in is being a proxy for the voice of the customer back into the organization. So we have a pretty rigid process. Not rigid, a pretty discipline process, I would argue, that allows us to get feedback from the field, listen to our customers, understand what's important to them, and reflect that in our product roadmap. And I'll let you know that's on a weekly cadence we do that. Now we're not doing that in a reactive fashion such that our roadmap diverts every single week in there, but we hear that constant feedback from the field as to what our customers are lacking. So lot of what you hear today, in terms of those six great announcements that we have were a combination of feedback that we've had over the last couple of years, I would argue. Because it's a dramatic shift to go from what we were previously, which was essentially six individual products that work really well together. But through the release of New Relic 1 in May earlier this year and what we announced today has truly developed us in to a observability platform. So monitoring with six different products to a true observably platform that's open, connected and programmable is a dramatic shift. And that's a combination of a bunch of feedback from our customers over the years. >> Yeah. I'm sure it's pretty much feedback from all customers. They're not asking for more tools and more interfaces and more things that they need to learn. >> Roger: Not at all, right. >> In many ways software can be a unifying feature especially that term platform who spend a bunch of time emphasizing what's needed from platform. >> Maybe, what were your costumers struggling with that kind of New Relic 1 in general is looking to solve as well as the observability piece? What went into that launch that was costumer pinpoints and things that they'd been asking for. >> Yeah maybe to stand back a little bit and understand some of the challenges that costumers had and then why they were asking for different solutions or evolution of our solution. If you think about today's world, there's this rapid development an deployment of software, so it's almost got to the point of continuous software deployment. And so your speed of needing to be able to react to problems in your environment, your costumer experience are degrading, ect. Being able to respond to that really quickly is essential, understanding the costumer experience is essential. You talked about operational efficiency of reducing the number of tooling sets or data sets that I'm looking at continually. So anything that we could provide to our costumers that allowed them to get to answers quicker, understand the why, and then be able to remediate that really easily so that the costumers have a greater experience. And at the same time reduces this friction that's unnecessarily introduced when you're going from one product to another, one tool to another and you're spending too much time rationalizing data sets across those tool sets. So consolidation is a big theme, ability to get to your answers really quickly is a big theme and that's really been the genesis of being able to create a platform. But not just a platform for consolidation, for better visibility, and observability but we believe it's not truly a platform until you can develop on it. If you think back in technology history of all the different peradams we've had throughout the history of technology, those who've won the platform wars over the years have been really good at being able to provide tools and ease of adoption of the platform by virtue of being able to build things on top of it. The ability to give people tools that allow them to build technology is really a therasense of the platform as well. >> You know, Roger, there's a certain trust level that costumers have to have if they're going to be building on top of your platform. >> When I've talked to costumers in New Relic they do talk about a partnership >> and the good back and forth but there's definitely a certain amount of stickiness once they've built something on your platform. >> Roger: Right, yeah. >> Any concerns from them as to, you know there's that term lock in out there as to the how do I know that this is going to work for me, and that I'm not going to have my pricing kind of crank up over time and be like oh my gosh, a year or two later, what did I get myself into? >> Right. It's a really important point that I'd like to start off by actually reemphasizing the point you made. I think we pride ourselves on the relationship we have with our costumers. It truly is the heart of everything at my organization does. We have this saying that we are because they are. In the realization that if we don't serve our costumers really well they have choices frequently, we're a saas vendor, the contracts come up for renewal frequently. And if you're unable to deliver on the promises that you made in the sales process, once they implement your solutions and try to use those in production, environments and everyday work if you can't deliver on those promises then you're going to breakdown that level of trust. And trust is at the center of all relationships as you know. Whether it's a personal relationship, you're playing on a sports team, whether you're working with your costumers. And so we want to make sure that we can deliver on those promises once we've sold them the product. So I haven't heard any specific concerns about lock in or anything, I think what they regularly come to us though with is they want us to have a really strong point of view, want us to be opinionated, tell them how this should work effectively together, what does best practice look like, what's the gold standard, what are some of the artifacts, tools, frameworks, reusable templates that we can share with them that accelerates their time to value. So I think the value significantly outweighs the concerns around lock in or reduction of the number of vendors that they're working with. >> If I look at really the enterprise space, you've got costumers working through their application modernization. They've got their modelist their going after micro services. I heard a stat that only about five to ten percent of apps are monitored at the app level today. >> Yeah, pretty scary, isn't it? >> Yeah, how many of your costumers are dealing with the installed state versus new deployments and what are some of the challenges you're hearing from costumers there? >> Yeah and I think it's important to pause that number because I think it's five to ten percent or growing to twenty percent as I think got indicated. If you look at those organizations Born In The Cloud or Born Digital it's significantly higher percentage of that which is possibly an indictment of the low level of instrumentation we see in a lot of legacy software technology stacks. And so I think in today's world we're tryna get that level of instrumentation observability up as much as possible. But maybe to link back to your previous question as well I think there's an important aspect here of when we move to a platform. When you're a product company your differentiation comes through product, comes through the capability of that product features and functions and we've certainly found ourselves in a significant number of those battles against competition where it's feature and function based. That's not a great comfort for the costumer. I think when you move to a platform it's very much around the networks differentiation. When I say network differentiation I think it's about getting the users of your service access to third party applications to third party data sources be they open source data emitters, opentelementry, open sensors, Zipkin any of those data sets that we are now in support for today. Giving them access to those data sets and being able to enrich the experience that we provide them that network effects and that's really where we see the opportunity to deliver significantly more value to our costumers with the ability to then build your own applications on top of the platform. That's second to none in the industry in my opinion. >> Roger, what's New Relic's role in helping costumers as really they're modernizing their work force? When I talk to so many companies it's like they need to retrain and they have to have new skill sets they need to make sure as certain cloud in automation changes where they focus on things and embrace devops and new ways of doing things. There are a lot of challenges there. Where does New Relic play in that modernization for costumers? >> You know what I think it's in a couple ways. The ways that we, my organization, can help the costumer in terms of just sheer understanding of the capability of the platform, what are best practices, how we can drive better accountability as you move to these new technology stacks and new ways of working much more agile environments. And so I think we can do a combination of that just sheer skills development, working really tightly with the likes of AWS you would've heard Dave McCann this morning talking about how when costumers migrate the application work goes to the AWS cloud environment. Hopefully they're not just doing that by way of compute lift and shift but they were actually looking at modernizing and refactoring those applications and when they do that, you heard Dave talk through a number of assets and frameworks and models and reusable best practices that we're trying to work with them on that we can give to our costumers that accelerate their journey 'cause it's not easy. We were talking to Chris Dillon this morning from Cox Automotive and when you think of an organization like that that's forty, fifty years old and has had to transform itself in terms of digital experience for it's costumer base, it's a significant cultural adjustment quite often to get teams to work in fundamentally different ways. So it's not an insignificant challenge but that's partly why we've invested so heavily in costumer success. Taking the costumers on the journey, thinking about their maturity over time, and constantly look for them to get better value from the platform. >> Roger, there are a number of things that have jumped out at me. Things like oh hey, we can save you potentially millions of dollars on your AWS cloud bill. You've already got costumers building on top of the platform, you had the future Haka event just a couple of weeks ago. Any other kind of interesting or exemplary costumer outcomes that you might be able to share? Either doesn't have to be about the new stuff but just that you've recently with your costumers. >> You know, one of the things that's most gratifying for me when talking to costumers is when we've been able to see when you work with older, more traditional companies that are undergoing some form of digital transformation and they're trying to shift a lot of the applications into a more modern stack and environment, become more agile, etc. they frequently sort of peel off part of the business and will have a digital division that will build some innovative, typically mobile based, apps. We've seen a number of different retailers that we've worked with. Number of different travel organizations where we've started out intrumenting the mobile application because they've built a new application to give their consumers or costumers access through to their services, and at some point that application is going to merge into the backend and have to connect back into older technology. And it's been the beauty of being able to connect those two different environments together. Not starting off at what we would've got as slightly easier place to start which was the more modern application environment where we are really well suited to. But then seeing the full value of being able to instrument the front end all the way through to the backend, link that back to the costumer's experience and to the impact on the business in terms of funnel analysis from number of people using the mobile application to actually ordering something to once they've ordered it, feeling satisfied in actually receiving the goods that they ordered. Being able to instrument all of that and understand the impact of performance and availability on the overall business arcam, that's when it's been truly transformational in working with costumers and that's certainly where we'd love to help more of our costumers in that fashion. >> Alright, Roger, want to give you the final word. Of course you bring together a number of costumers here at FutureStack in the U.S as well there's a few of those run in other geographical areas but throughout the year, any other key things you want to highlight as to how costumers can get engaged even more. >> Yeah, I mean, we've got a sort of what I would argue is a tiered approach to costumer success. At the very high end of our engagement model we have a significant number of resources. Solution architects, costumer success managers that we can deploy directly with our costumers. We typically do that in conjunction with them, build out success plans, etc. What we looking at investing Heavily at the moment is also having a good understanding of what the ideal costumer journey is like. Realizing that a costumer can come to an event like this and learn about our product but the best way for them to experience that is in the course of using the product. So heavy focus on product lead growth and how we actually deliver better value through the product itself, remove friction and adoption and getting to better value. We want to automate some of that costumer journey so that we know that if you've just signed up and, for instance, you've configured you're agent and you've done your learning policy but you haven't yet configured a custom apdex on that application or you haven't understood what your key transactions are, we've got all that data in the backend. So we're working really hard to understand how we get that information back out to costumers and go hey we know you haven't necessarily done this yet, here's some access to great assets. A short video clip, a self paced learn guide that somebody can get on demand from an LMS system. So trying to use a combination of direct resource investment, events like this where it's great to make announcements like we did about the six grade innovations and then increasingly using digital through the products but also through just the general costumer journey to say hey this is really important content and information, you should look at this now 'cause it's going to add value in what you're doing today. >> Alright, well Roger Scott, Chief Customer Officer at New Relic, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks so much, it's been great talking to you. >> All right. I'm Stu Minimen back with lots more here at New Relic FutureStack 2019 in New York City. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (outro music)